I was admittedly very slow to the party on this one - 11 years infact (it just goes to show you can sim for many years and somehow magically through absolutely nothing but sheer luck - and ignorance - avoid the bugs that others find very quickly). I am talking about a well discussed issue that reared its head around 2015 and so far as I can tell, was never, ever resolved. You would fly, for example, from ORBX Concrete 3W5 to ORBX Darrington 1S2. A very short flight - lovely and scenic and just the thing if you only have half an hour to spare. You would then arrive at 1S2 and (to use the words of one of the respondents) it becomes a ghost town. No objects. No nothing. Maybe a bit of autogen if you are lucky. And the low resolution satellite underlay. That's it.

There were only ever two solutions offered: one was to use the old ".OFF" trick on the 1S2 polygon file and then you would have everything except of course the polygon. Meaning no proper runway, taxiways, etc. A last resort sort of thing if you ask me! The other option was to re-load the entire scenery library when you were about 5 miles out from 1S2. Not great - you are basically loading the entire flight all over again as the refresh scenery option does not work. But it does "work" if you love the ultimate mid-VFR-scenic flight immersion spoiler!

Now although I have owned most ORBX PNW airports for years, I have never flown from 3W5 to 1S2! I've done the opposite many times. And I've made lots of flights out of 1S2 and lots into 1S2, but never from 3W5! So I never knew about this bug till I decided this weekend to do that flight. What followed was a day of reading old forum posts and trying everything at my end to see if there was a solution other than the two offered (there wasn't).

As Alex Goff finally admitted, it had him stumped, had everyone stumped and all the theories about too many objects, etc came to nought. So it was never fixed and we live with these workarounds. For my own part, since I have written extensive scripts to pre-configure P3D before it loads up, I've just added an option in this case to load the whole PNW region with 3W5 and the whole region without it - since 3W5 is actually the culprit here - get rid of that and 1S2 works perfectly. But as soon as you ever load up 3W5 (either by flying from it or because you overflew it enroute to 1S2), 3W5 will forcibly unload all the objects at 1S2. This is also probably why people find 1S2 "unloading" even when they fly from elsewhere - if 3W5 is the last airport to load into your system enroute, then you will lose all the 1S2 objects. But if any other airports loads afterwards and then you go to 1S2, it is fine.

What I am interested in finding out is whether Lockheed Martin were able to shed any light on this and whether there are any other instances where this unloading occurs (it would be when two airports are within the minimum scenery loading radius of each other - in v4 that is 32,000 metres though you can change it manually though go into the interface and it always changes back to 32,000.

Actually if I get some time I'm going to ".OFF" files at Concrete to see if I can find whether there is a specific culprit (including autogen files), since everyone else seems to have only bothered experimenting at the Darrington end (but I think the bug is triggered by Concrete - Darrington just happens to be the victim). It's certainly an interesting "bug" (if you can call it that - someone like to blame ORBX - I just blame it on these things being extremely complex and sometimes things happen that are too hard and not worth the angst to solve as the issues rarely occur.

Ok wait, Darrington to Concrete, or the other way around, has been my favorite flight for quite a while (since FS9 maybe, with Holger Sandmann North Cascades freeware scenery...). Until very recently, these two airports were the only payware OrbX airports I had ever bought, right after I bought the OrbX PNW region. They were also the only two airports I ever bought in XPlane, and they were the first two airports I bought in MSFS. So I know them quite well, and since quite a long time.

And the thing is, I have never ever seen or heard anything about the bug you're mentioning here, may it be in P3D v2, nor in P3Dv3, nor P3Dv4, let alone XPlane 11, XPlane 12, MSFS and MSF2024.

So apparently, I'm even more late to the party than you have ever been... 😕

Edited February 15Feb 15 by Daube
grammar and syntax :P